Literacy Assessment

Literacy assessment is the evaluation of literacy skills to understand how young children are developing and performing in the domain of literacy. Literacy assessment can be formative or summative. Formative assessment is when data collected from assessment is used to “look forward” for planning purposes. It is used to provide information to educators and caregivers to support children’s learning. Literacy assessments can also be summative and used to “look backward” to provide a summary thus far of children’s learning at a set point in time. Literacy is a complex, multifaceted domain of development for young children and there are key areas of literacy to consider for assessment in early childhood education.